As we’ve seen in other posts in this series, the digital revolution is creating many new opportunities for retail banking. It is also putting increasing pressure on banks to improve their efficiency. The importance of innovation grows every day.

This accelerating pace of change creates new challenges for training and skill development at banks. Legacy training strategies and systems were simply not built to deal with learning at the speed of digital.

That is why Intesa Sanpaolo built a new one. The Italian banking group employees over 40,000 people. Delivering training for a new initiative or regulatory requirement is expensive and can take up to nine months.

To address these issues, Intesa Sanpaolo launched an all-new digital learning portal last year. The system is takes inspiration from streaming services like Netflix to let employees take control of their own learning.

“E-learning is nothing new,” said Renato Dorrucci, Intesa Sanpaolo’s learning, development and management academy head, at last year’s Efma-Accenture Distribution & Marketing Innovation (DMI) Awards for retail banking. “But… you needed to stay connected for a while. One hour, half an hour, two hours, depending.”

Intesa Sanpaolo’s new learning portal encourages employees to learn all the time by lowering this minimum commitment. Employees can access a library of training videos on the digital device of their choosing. The videos are produced by a team of training experts and creative professionals. None is longer than five minutes. Employees can create playlists of videos they want to watch. The playlists can be paused so employees can leave and come back as they wish.

“Now you can choose, because all of the learning objects, as we call them, are very short, so you can build up your session, taking how many as you want in that very moment and then keeping on watching the others,” said Dorrucci.

The new platform also includes a dedicated app for leadership development. The app delivers personalized business and technology news, training videos on management best practices, and social networking features to bank executives.

Since its launch, Intesa Sanpaolo’s new platform has reached thousands of employees and lowered training execution costs by up to 20 percent.

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